Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [52]
When Wright tried extending the season into the fall, proposing to continue well into 1926, he learned that Harry G. Sommers’ twenty-year lease on the theater was coming to an end. Meanwhile, the million-dollar Regent, a new brick-and-stone palace on Crescent Street, had been given over to moving pictures. William Wurzburg, the Regent’s managing director, coveted the stability and prestige of a resident stock company, and had been thinking of starting one of his own when Sommers’ abandonment of the Powers lease got out and he was able to make a deal for Papa Wright’s company instead. The significance of the move to the new theater for Tracy and the other cast members was that the Regent could continue playing movies on Sundays and, with the addition of a Friday matinee, the Broadway Players could finally afford the luxury of a six-day work week.
Unfortunately, the move to the Regent came concurrently with the announcement of Selena Royle’s departure. The Green Hat was playing a shakedown engagement in Chicago prior to Broadway, and Selena had been offered the chance to replace Ann Harding in the role of Venice Pollen opposite Katharine Cornell. Leaving was something she regarded with mixed emotions. The audiences and the new surroundings were wonderful, yet Spence was becoming a constant irritant with his ad-libs and his willingness to break character when something suddenly struck him as funny.
As the hysterical Annabelle in The Cat and the Canary, the last play of her engagement, Selena was required to step behind a screen and change into nightclothes toward the end of the second act. Emily, who had fashioned a lovely pair of black satin pyjamas for the occasion, wanted to put elastic in the waist, but Selena, in thinking through the dialogue and physical business that would attend the change, decided on a drawstring instead. One night, she made the change, tied the drawstring, and played the rest of the scene as written, fainting dead away when a body came tumbling out of a hidden panel at curtain. She began the third act with Spence placing her on a couch, still clad in the pyjamas, the other cast members surrounding them. “As I came out of the faint and arose to walk across stage, I heard an audible gasp from the audience. Spence, who could break up on stage over any small deflection, started to grin and giggle, and I looked down. My pyjamas had dropped around my feet.
“Thank goodness, having changed on stage, I was fully underclothed. So hissing at Spence, ‘Shut up, you damn fool!’ I reached down, pulled up the pyjamas, retied them, and went on with the scene to a resounding round of applause.” The audience clapped and clapped; Selena took bows, Spence took bows, they bowed to each other. Yet it was hard to stay mad at him when he misbehaved so. “There was no one I wanted to act with so much as Spence, and I know he felt the same way. We had our ups and downs, of course, but they were always resolved by good sense and the pride we both had in doing the best job possible.”
She may also have been aware that Spence was involved with the company’s ingenue, a pretty brunette named Betty Hanna, and that when Louise sensed an affair, she mistakenly assumed that Selena was the culprit. Having Sundays off gave him more time to spend at home, but getting Weeze out of the apartment was a chore. “I think if she had been the emotionally ‘in-love’ type, he would have driven her stark staring mad,” Emily Deming said. “Once, when I was babysitting, when they came back they were arguing. And I got out as fast as I could. But I think I was changing Johnny … I had to stay for a few minutes … I was upset by what was happening, and I thought as I went out the door, ‘I’d smash a plate over your head if you were my husband.’ That was the only time I ever heard him [yell at her]. I didn’t hear her voice at all.”
There was an amusement park at Reed’s Lake on